“Now the fun begins”: the Central Election Commission excluded Grudinin from the lists of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation

The Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation excluded businessman Pavel Grudinin from the election list of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation on Saturday. The decision was made “based on information from the Prosecutor General’s Office on the ownership of foreign financial instruments.”

His ex-wife Irina said that Gudinin owns a stake in a foreign offshore company.

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Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov came to the CEC to defend Grudinin.

“You have no reason. This is hack work and real reprisals,” he said.

Zyuganov claimed that representatives of Grudinin’s ex-wife were scammers and did not allow them to speak. CEC Chairman Ella Pamfilova gave the politician a sharp rebuke.

“We have now arranged this discussion out of respect for you. We have no reason to arrange this. We have a decision from the Prosecutor General's Office. This is more than sufficient reason. If we do not comply with the decision of the prosecutor's office, it will sue us. You have the right to sue both the prosecutor's office and us. We do not have the competence to conduct an investigation, evaluate people, call them bandits, sorry Gennady Andreevich. The legal representative of the ex-wife has the same basis as you,” Pamfilova said.

Grudinin himself believes that the documents provided to the CEC were falsified.

“What the representatives of the Prosecutor General’s Office showed has nothing to do with real documents. Let the non-prosecutor figure out who allegedly handed over from Belize (in fact this is impossible) the documents that became the basis for removing candidate Grudinin from the election race. My ex-wife does not act independently. At one time, she came under the influence of United Russia and the raiders who do everything for her,” he told the liberal Dozhd TV channel.

Grudinin considers it an argument in his favor that the people who represented his ex-wife at the Central Election Commission previously defended the interests of Dmitry Medvedev in the proceedings to “investigate” the criminal blogger Alexei Navalny.

At the end of the CEC meeting, Gennady Zyuganov said that the Communist Party of the Russian Federation intends to appeal to the Supreme Court and the ECHR.

“But we have other levers. We do not agree with this arbitrariness. We will hold a nationwide campaign. My personal point of view is that these September elections are the last opportunity to peacefully rectify the situation. I know how it all starts in “hot spots”. Let’s do everything to ensure that the country peacefully emerges from the systemic crisis,” Zyuganov said.

Left-wing politician Nikolai Platoshkin has already stated that the exclusion of Grudinin from the election list will only add votes to the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.

“Thank you very much to the Central Election Commission. Today they added 5% of the votes to the left-patriotic bloc,” Platoshkin said.

Against the backdrop of this pathos, both liberal and pro-government experts agree that Grudinin’s removal from the elections was beneficial to Zyuganov himself.

“The Communist Party of the Russian Federation, as we understand, handed over Grudinin a long time ago, and Gennady Andreevich Zyuganov, in my opinion, knew about this decision for a long time. Both for the presidential administration and for Gennady Andreevich Zyuganov, who is quite cooperating with it, it was important that Pavel Grudinin was not going to go to the presidential elections in 2024, because his experience of participation in public politics in 2017-2018 was generally good,” – said political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky on the Ekho Moskvy radio station.

“It’s nice for Gennady Andreich - it wasn’t he who pulled the sponsor out of the list, but it turns out that he himself got cut out. But what should we do with Grudinin’s contribution?” – writes political scientist Alexey Mukhin in his Telegram channel. 

“And now the fun begins. With what degree of opposition will the Communist Party of the Russian Federation fight to restore Grudinin to the lists of candidates for the State Duma? Will he expose his old agreements with the Kremlin? Will it drift towards the pileup? – political scientist Marat Bashirov makes forecasts.